‘Sharp Objects’ Finale Recap: Good Apple, Bad Tree

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Amy Adams in "Sharp Objects."CreditCreditAnne Marie Fox/HBO

By Judy Berman

Aug. 26, 2018

Episode 8, ‘Milk’

“It’s the family, Camille,” Detective Richard Willis insisted in last week’s episode, just after arresting John Keene for the murder of his little sister, Natalie. “It’s always the [expletive] family.” And he was right; he just had the wrong family in mind. The Keenes’ only crime was to move their gentle son and unladylike daughter to a town where the penalty for diverging from gender norms is death.

Willis’s outburst was hardly the first clue “Sharp Objects” had given us that there was something rotten at the core of the Crellin clan. In Episode 5, Vickery — who is pretty much always wrong — called Camille a “bad apple” from a “good tree.” Earlier in the mini-series, by way of delivering the news that Amma was sneaking out at night, he told Adora, of her daughters, “One of them is dangerous and the other one is in danger.” Like Willis, he was onto something; he just erroneously assumed that Camille was the troublemaker and Amma was the helpless victim.

Of course, there were also plenty of hints about individual characters’ potential for cruelty. Adora’s nastiness was all on the surface, from the pleasure she seemed to take in hurting and humiliating Camille to the way she flaunted whatever was going on between her and Vickery in front of her husband. It took a while longer to discern that she had manufactured Marian’s fatal sickness and that she was now regularly poisoning Amma in order to take care of the girl. “She’s mentally ill,” Adora protests, referring to Camille, in the finale, as she’s dragged away in handcuffs. It’s her final misdiagnosis — because, obviously, she’s the one who is mentally ill.

It has looked, at various moments, as though Alan could have been the killer. (Willis’s aside, when Camille and Amma are in the hospital, that Adora might have pulled the girls’ teeth with help from Alan suggests that the writers intentionally encouraged this theory.) He’s eerily quiet and withdrawn. He may or may not carry a gun. His sexless marriage has left the otherwise mild-mannered Southern gentleman prone to fits of rage.

In the end, these details read less like misdirection than like an acknowledgment that, despite his aloofness, Alan is deeply implicated in Adora’s crimes. He’s far from the scariest monster in this story, but it’s chilling that, even after Marian’s death, he has registered only the mildest complaints about Adora’s methods of “taking care of” Amma. This week, we observed just how complicit Alan is in his wife’s Munchausen by Proxy: Not only does he talk Amma out of leaving the house, bribing her with cake, but he flat-out lies to Willis when the detective shows up at the Crellins’ door in search of Camille. In that sense, he truly is Adora’s accomplice.

But, as we discover in the final minutes of “Sharp Objects,” the real murderer is Amma. If you’re confused about the mini-series’s conclusion, or missed the montage nested within the closing credits, here’s a quick summary: In St. Louis, after learning from the mother of Amma’s new friend Mae (Iyana Halley) that the girls are quarreling — and that Mae is nowhere to be found — Camille follows a trail of clues to Amma’s dollhouse. (Imagine transporting that Manhattan-apartment-sized behemoth across the state in a beat-up sedan like Camille’s.) Hidden within Adora’s closed-off room in the toy mansion, she finds a sparkling molar and a floor tiled with human teeth. “Don’t tell Mama,” Amma begs Camille when she knows she’s been found out.

In the montage, we see quick shots of each murder: It appears that Natalie did die in Ashley’s family’s carriage house, which explains the blood on the carpet. (What remains ambiguous is whether Amma originally intended to frame John, who clearly fascinates her, or Ashley, whom she despises.) A glimpse of Ann struggling in the river reveals that the accomplices Amma would have needed to pull the girls’ teeth were her two sidekicks. That explains why no one in this clique was afraid of the “baby killer” stalking the streets of Wind Gap at night.

So, why did Amma do it? Well, she was presumably jealous of Adora’s relationships with Ann and Natalie. (Recall that Amma’s partners in crime seem to barely know and generally dislike Adora.) Later, when she became attached to Camille (who mentions to Curry that the girl sleeps in her bed), Amma began to see Mae as competition. In her drug-addled monologue at the end of Episode 6, Amma told Camille about how she manipulates boys: “When you let them do it to you, you’re really doing it to them,” she said. “You have the control.”

When Adora’s Munchausen came to light, last week, the suggestion was that Amma used the same tricks on her mom. What wasn’t necessarily obvious was that she wasn’t manipulating Adora in order to run wild with her friends; she was getting dangerously trashed and committing murder in order to keep a stranglehold on her mother’s care and attention. When Adora shifted her attention from her own compliant daughter to two incorrigible girls, Ann and then Natalie, Amma reinvented herself as both the perfect challenge and the perfect victim. That must have been what she meant when she told Camille, “I get funny ideas sometimes.” It’s certainly why she was so broken up when Adora got arrested, and so emotional while visiting her in jail.

Toward the end of Gillian Flynn’s book, which draws out its final twist for a bit longer than the show does, Camille meditates further on Amma’s motives. “You can come up with 4000 other guesses, of course, as to why Amma did it,” she muses. “In the end, the fact remains: Amma enjoyed hurting. I like violence, she’d shrieked at me.” Finally, Camille concludes, “I blame my mother. A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”

But after hearing Adora’s story about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her own mother, it seems safe to conclude that the blame reaches high into the branches of that particular family tree.

It’s always the family. And in this case, that family consists of a mother who can only show her love through causing pain, a daughter who succumbed to that fatal care and a daughter who learned to leverage her mom’s cruelty and her dead sister’s passivity into a sick, self-serving form of sadomasochism. Throw into that mix a father who, like the typical Wind Gap man, has convinced himself that child care is his wife’s domain, and you have the makings of a Gothic horror story — which is exactly what “Sharp Objects” becomes in the finale, when Camille narrowly avoids becoming the second daughter to die from Adora’s twisted ministrations.

Camille’s sacrifice, to save Amma and to find out once and for all whether Adora is poisoning her children, is heroic. It’s also the ultimate expression of the particular illness she acquired growing up in the Crellin household — and in Wind Gap, a town whose violent, sadomasochistic tendencies were shaped by Adora’s ancestors, the Calhouns. Instead of playing her mother’s game, by cutting into her own skin, Camille became both the attacker and the victim, both Adora and Marian. Unlike Amma, however, she only ever took out her aggression on herself.

Camille certainly has more in common with her mother and sisters than she would like, and while she may not share any of Alan’s DNA, she does seem to share some of his denial. Fighting for her life on Adora’s ivory floor, she has a strange vision that I believe is a flashback: There she is on that same floor with Marian, as a kid. It’s a room she would have only been allowed to enter while she was ill and being cared for by Adora. And just before the vision ends, young Camille’s eyes widen. In that moment, I think Camille is remembering something she had blocked out. On some level, hasn’t she always suspected that her mother caused Marian’s death?

I imagine plenty of viewers will be disappointed by this ending. If you’ve been asking, “Where’s the murder mystery?,” you might object that you guessed this outcome weeks ago. But this is what I love about “Sharp Objects,” and what makes it more resonant than so many other murder mysteries: It’s a story about a woman finally facing the scars of the trauma she endured within her family and in the town that is a mirror of that family.

In a sense, the mini-series is like that childhood memory Camille recovers on Adora’s floor. Sure, the viewer suspects from the beginning that a family as prominent and as broken as the Crellins must have something to do with those murders. Learning what really happened to Ann and Natalie doesn’t feel like a revelation — it feels like accepting a horrible truth you’ve buried somewhere within yourself. I’ve never seen another TV show so elegantly simulate the experience of living with trauma.

The final question, the one “Sharp Objects” leaves unnervingly open, is whether Camille can truly be a good person with Adora’s blood running through her veins. “Of my three girls, you’re the one most like me,” Adora tells Camille in a chilling bathtub scene. In the piece of writing Curry reads out loud, Camille wonders whether she enjoys caring for Amma because she’s kind or because she’s sick like her mother. “Lately, I’ve been leaning toward kindness,” she writes. (The sentence actually ends Flynn’s novel.)

I’m leaning toward kindness, too. But perhaps the most accurate rendering of Camille comes from Amma, when she’s talking about the Greek goddess Persephone at dinner. “I feel bad for Persephone,” she says. “Because even when she’s back with the living, they’re afraid of her because of where she’s been.” That’s Camille, all right, who ventured back to the underworld of Wind Gap and will be forever stained by what she found there — an outcast in her hometown and in any happier place she might ever find herself.